Monday 20th January 2014
It was another good day of preparation today and Alex had the benefit of watching the whole of his opponents match before they play each other tomorrow.
The only practice courts available at the club were between 8-9am this morning so instead of getting up unnecessarily early we decided to join Anastasia Mikheeva and her coach, Marcel, at the Sparta Club for training this morning.
After negotiating the Metro and avoiding getting ripped off by an overpriced taxi, we arrived at the Sparta Club at about 9.15am. The club is a National Training centre and the court that we warmed up on had huge posters of the victorious Davis Cup and Fed Cup teams from 2011 and 2012 – not a bad motivator for Holly and Alex. Once we had warmed up we went into another tennis hall where we met Anastasia and Marcel. We then had a really good hour of drilling and point play where both Holly and Alex found really good levels throughout the session.
At 11am we were finished and so got a taxi back to the tournament site where we had some lunch and caught up on the action from the Australian Open. Due to there not being any practice courts available until 7pm we spent the rest of the afternoon watching different matches until Alex’s opponents went on court.
The match was won by wildcard Daniel Velek from the Czech Republic and throughout the match Alex and I talked and made notes on how we would play against him in the next round. After the match Holly and Alex went into the gym to go through their injury prevention programmes and then stretched out to end their training day.
.jpg "Alex completing his band work while Holly goes through her core programme in the background")
Alex completing his band work while Holly goes through her core programme in the background
Dinner tonight was once again at Coloseum and it was another excellent meal; Holly and Alex stuck with the pasta while I gave the chicken pizza a try!
When we had finished dinner we went to the supermarket to stock up on some supplies for tomorrow and then headed back to the hotel to relax before having an early night.
Schedule for tomorrow:
(2) Alex Hagon (GBR) (821) vs (WC) Daniel Velek (CZE) (UNR) – 4th match after 9am
